Editor’s Note: In the more than three years since the devastating Battle of Ilovaisk, a Russian military offensive in August 2014 that led to the first Minsk (and still unfulfilled) peace agreement, there are still many questions. How many were killed? The official count is 366 Ukrainian soldiers, most shot while retreating on the enemy’s false promise of safe passage. Independent investigators believe the casualty count is higher and some Ukrainian soldiers remain missing. Official inquiries found that senior Ukrainian commanders caused the debacle because of poor decisions. But no one has ever been held to account.
Recovering the dead
For the many desperate Ukrainian families of soldiers and volunteer fighters who have gone missing in Russia’s war in the eastern Donbas, Yaroslav Zhylkin is the last hope.
In early September 2014, Zhylkin, the head of Ukraine’s casualty-recovery efforts, first went to the Donbas to start retrieving and identifying the remains of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers. He led a 60-member group of volunteers that took responsibility for recovering the bodies of fallen Ukrainian fighters.
“It’s not a life-or-death question, it’s rather a question of being forgotten forever,” Zhylkin told the Kyiv Post.
Yaroslav Zhylkin, the head of Ukraine’s casualty-recovery efforts, tells about recovering of the dead bodies in Ilovaisk. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Zhylkin’s group, dubbed Black Tulip, arrived in Sector B (the area of the war zone that includes Ilovaisk) on Sept. 2, 2014. They soon headed to Saur-Mohyla, a strategic height in Donetsk Oblast near the Russian border, where they saw damaged buildings and burned military vehicles scattered across the road following fierce fighting.
They documented everything they saw in a series of diaries, indicating the locations of graves, drawing the sketches of the places where they retrieved the bodies, and taking pictures of every spot they visited.
“Photographs and soil never lie – you can understand what was going on by what you see on the spot,” Zhylkin said.
Since then, they’ve found and evacuated the remains of more than 150 Ukrainian soldiers who died fighting against Russian-led forces in Ilovaisk, home to 15,600 residents and Saur-Mohyla in the summer of 2014. They also collected the remains of crew members who burned to death in military vehicles, and risked their lives combing through fields controlled by Russia’s proxy forces, which are dotted with mines and unexploded shells.
In 2017, the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine concluded that 366 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, 429 wounded and 300 captured during military operations near Ilovaisk in August 2014.
At the same time, Memory Book, a citizen volunteer project that collects information about Ukrainian soldiers killed in battle, records the deaths of around 700 Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas in August 2014. Numerous Kyiv Post sources also state that the real number of killed is at least one-and-a-half times higher than the figure reported by prosecutors.
Around 800 civilians were reported as killed during the same period, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
A cross belonging to a killed Ukrainian soldier escavated by the Black Tulip rescue group led by Yaroslav Zhylkin near the village of Zelene on Sept. 28, 2014. (Photo from archive of Soyuz Narodnaya Pamyat) (Soyuz Narodnaya Pamyat )
Who’s to blame?
The Ilovaisk tragedy sent Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to the first peace negotiations in Minsk, Belarus in September 2014. His only trump was the Russian dog tags that were taken from the battlefield, showing undisputed proof of the Kremlin involvement in the war.
All the same, Ukraine got unfavorable peace terms, agreeing to give the Donbas special status. The first Minsk agreement didn’t even mention Crimea, which Russia had invaded and annexed in March 2014, and there were no clear provisions for returning control of the Russian border until early 2015.
The families of the hundreds of soldiers killed and captured in Ilovaisk, and many of the surviving soldiers themselves, blame top military officials, including former Defense Minister Valeriy Heletey and chief of the General Staff Viktor Muzhenko, for bungling the military operation, causing the catastrophic losses.
Many were especially outraged that a large military parade was held in Kyiv on Aug. 24, Ukraine’s Independence Day, while troops in Ilovaisk were starved of ammunition, supplies and reinforcements, even as there were numerous reports about Russian soldiers entering Ukraine.
While both Muzhenko and Heletey denied hearing any reports of the Russian invasion before Aug. 24, a special parliamentary commission that was formed in September 2014 and lead by lawmaker Andriy Senchenko revealed in its report that the General Staff was informed as early as Aug. 23 that Russian troops were crossing the border, but that when told this, Muzhenko replied: “Don’t chicken out! It’s all bullshit.”
Heletey resigned in October 2015, while Muzhenko remains head of the General Staff to this day.
In October 2015, the General Staff published a detailed analysis of the fighting in and around Ilovaisk, pinning the blame for the defeat on several units for desertion, but mainly for the fact that Russia had invaded in strength. However, the Kyiv Post has found numerous discrepancies between the report’s findings and information given by soldiers in interviews.
Interviews with Muzhenko and General Ruslan Khomchak, the top commander of the Ilovaisk operation, would help to clarify those discrepancies. But Khomchak hasn’t responded to the Kyiv Post’s requests for an interview, and Muzhenko refused to give it.
In August 2017, the Military Prosecutor’s Office published the results of its own investigation, which put most of the blame on the Russian invasion, “numerous cases of desertion” by soldiers and “some mistakes” by military commanders.
The reports have failed to answer the questions of many Ilovaisk veterans and their families, who hold rallies every year on Aug. 29 to demand answers. Meanwhile, military historians who have collected witness testimony about the battle have been raising even more questions.
Why were the ill-prepared volunteer battalions used as the main combat force in the operation? Why were the troops left encircled for so long? Why weren’t the necessary reinforcements sent in? And why did negotiations with the Russian military end up with the shelling of retreating Ukrainian troops?
The Kyiv Post will keep on collecting the stories of those who survived Ilovaisk, and will publish the truth as it becomes known.
